Riley Keough Opened Up to Oprah About Grief and Family

Riley Keough invited Oprah into her grandfather Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate in an hour-long CBS special on October 8. This marked Keough’s first in-depth interview since the death of her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, whose posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, is out now. “She was incredibly insecure, and I think there were moments where she kind of was going, ‘Why am I even writing a book about myself?’” recalled Keough, who finished writing the book at her mother’s request. According to Keough, Presley wanted to share her story in a “hopeful kind of way,” especially after her son Benjamin Keough died by suicide in 2020.

One anecdote from the book that’s already making headlines is that Presley kept Benjamin’s corpse on dry ice for two months, at one point even showing it to a tattoo artist. Keough told Oprah that she sees how the story “sounds completely insane and absurd” on paper, but said that her mother “wasn’t a crazy lady.” According to Keough, a “very compassionate funeral homeowner” helped Presley figure out how to preserve Benjamin’s body at home while she was figuring out burial logistics. Presley also wanted to get a matching tattoo in the same place as one her son had. When a tattoo artist came to the house and asked for reference photos, Presley opted to lead him to the body for a firsthand look. “He — God bless him — was very normal about the whole thing,” Keough said, noting that she followed them into the room for the “absurd” moment. After the tattoo artist left, she said she asked her mother, “Do you know how fucking crazy that was, what you just did?” 

Keough said that while leaning into “a close proximity to death” during the grieving process might not be as common in western cultures, she thinks that approach “resonated” with her mother, who found comfort in being near Benjamin’s body after he died. In the memoir, Presley similarly described mourning her father, Elvis, while alone with his casket at age 9. “I went down to where he was lying in the casket, just to be with him, to touch his face and hold his hand, to talk to him,” she wrote. “I asked him, ‘Why is this happening? Why are you doing this?’” 

Keough told Oprah that the memoir’s title is a reference to the lyrics of a “beautiful” song that her mother recorded as a duet with Elvis after his death. But From Here to the Great Unknown also has another meaning for her. “I think having two family members who have passed away, a lot of that time and grief has been spent wondering about where they are,” Keough explained. “And I think that the perspective that I choose to have is that they’re on to a sort of new adventure, to the great unknown.”